- From: Dean Jackson <dean@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 02:47:46 +1100
- To: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- Cc: kmarks@technorati.com, Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>, shellen@google.com, www-html@w3.org, tantek@technorati.com
Karl, On 29 Jan 2005, at 20:05, Karl Dubost wrote: > > Le 22 janv. 2005, à 16:52, Dan Brickley a écrit : >> I've been following the threads in >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2005Jan/ >> about the >> http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html >> proposal, and the draft definition at >> http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/RelNoFollow > > And I have just finished to read the whole thread… > > so far, I have one problem with rel="nofollow", they encourage all > publishing tools to put automatically "nofollow" to all links coming > from external contributions and that is just plain wrong without > giving the possibility to the user to change the nature of the rel. > The problem is often the same, imposing a choice to the user without > giving the possibility to deactivate it. > > So I'm interested to know if publishing tools implement > rel="nofollow", what do they implement if on my weblog (by an > editorial choice), I want to say: "This link is worthwhile and should > be followed." I expect tools will eventually provide you with the ability to do this. If you know the comment is spam then you should delete it (no need for nofollow). If you know the comment is ham then you shouldn't mark its links with nofollow. It's the range in between (where you are not yet sure of spam or ham status) that should default to nofollow. And yes, you should be able to change the state. > As a second thing, I can't wait the abuse made by spammers of this new > attribute. After the "meta name" indexing which has been abused, and > then not indexed by some search engines, I'm pretty sure there will be > surprises with the rel="nofollow". It may be the case that this can be abused, but I don't see the harm in trying it out. It's a low-cost approach that may reduce the impact, if not the amount, of comment spam on the Web. If it is abused, then you can stop using it. Remember that spiders can stop following links at any time on a page, so all nofollow does is give them a hint. Taking away the hint doesn't mean the link *will* be spidered. Dean
Received on Monday, 31 January 2005 15:47:55 UTC